All's fair in love and geopolitics

The report that the US was contemplating a nuclear deal with Pakistan similar to the one it has with India is yet another confirmation of the salience of geopolitics in international relationsAmericarsquos relations with Pakistan have had their decadal ups and downs Not surprisingly these have often mirrored the geopolitical interests of Washington In the 1950s it was the contest with the Soviet Union and so Pakistan located strategically in what was called the ldquonorthern tierrdquo was privileged over the much larger India which wanted to avoid getting entangled in superpower competitionUS Secretary of State John Kerry left with Pakistan PM Nawaz Sharif at the United Nations headquarters on September 27 Emerging SinoPak alliance is one of the factors that has motivated the US to offer Islamabad the hand of friendship which Pak has been seeking from the time of the IndoUS nuclear deal PicAFPOf course as is well known Pakistan was not motivated by any anticommunist ideology but its own contest with India This was evident as early as 1962 when it befriended communist China because it offered a more consistent antiIndian stageAfter a hiatus in which the US was preoccupied by the Vietnam war Pakistanrsquos importance was recognised by Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon as a key to their ldquoChina pivotrdquo aimed at outflanking the Soviets The monstrous price for this was the support that the KissingerNixon duo gave to Islamabad in prosecuting its genocidal war against the liberation movement in BangladeshA decade later came the final contest with the Soviet Union and this time Pakistan was not wanting It provided Washington the platform needed to bleed the Soviets never mind the price for that mdash the curse of jihadism with which we are still grappling The bonus for Islamabad was that Washington turned a Nelsonrsquos eye on Pakistanrsquos nuclear weapons programmeRoughly a decade later the Americans were back this time to fight the jihadists their earlier intervention had bred The price this time has been in dollars mdash the 31 billion that has come by way of Islamabad as military and economic aid between 20022015 mdash and in the blood and treasure that the US has expended in Afghanistan in considerable measure because of Pakistani duplicitySo what motivates the US this time to offer Islamabad the hand of friendship No doubt geopolitical considerations relating to jihadism and Afghanistan are important elements But the emerging SinoPak alliance is an added factor Intermixed are legacy concerns of the Obama administration which has ambitiously articulated a vision of a nuclear weapons free worldFrom the time of the IndoUS nuclear deal Pakistan has sought a similar arrangement for itself It is using its time tested tactic of holding a gun to its own head to achieve its goal First it has blocked all efforts to finalise the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty FMCT Second it sharply ramped up its production of nuclear weapons abandoning all pretenses of maintaining a ldquocredible minimum deterrencerdquo and moving to what it calls ldquofull spectrumrdquo deterrenceHowever given Islamabadrsquos terrible proliferation record most experts initially laughed off the possibility At the time many of us argued that the IndoUS nuclear deal arose out of the desire of the US to build closer strategic ties with India as a means of offsetting Chinarsquos rise Now it would appear that the American motives are more complexIslamabad has been insistently pushing for a nuclear deal most recently in the seventh round of the USPakistan Security Strategic Stability and Nonproliferation SSSampNP working group in June The press release following the talks held under the auspices of the USPakistan strategic dialogue says it all ldquoThe US delegation welcomed Pakistanrsquos efforts to harmonise its strategic trade controls with those of the Nuclear Suppliers Group and other multilateral export control regimes Both sides emphasised the desirability of continued outreach to integrate Pakistan into the international nonproliferation regime Pakistan stressed the need for access to peaceful nuclear technology as a socioeconomic imperativerdquoA Pakistani nuclear deal would suggest that the US is determined as it has always been to maintain good ties with both India and Pakistan Those in India who expected that Washingtonrsquos unhappiness with Islamabad would result in undivided attention to New Delhi will be disappointed But the US is following the logic of its geopolitical interestsSo sooner rather than later Pakistan will get what it wants Indiarsquos best option is to let things ride Opposing the deal for the sake of opposing it is a foolrsquos errand not unlike the hysteria that India unleashed when the US decided to supply F16s to Pakistan in 198182What we need to do is to learn yet another lesson on the relentlessness with which big powers pursue their interests and move ahead on the project that will give us geopolitical heft in Asia The economic transformation that will enable us to straddle the region from the Middle East to SouthEast AsiaThe writer is a Distinguished Fellow Observer Research Foundation New Delhi